How Conscious Leadership Transforms Lives and Organizations Through Purpose with Raj Sisodia

Tough times are guaranteed to come for all of us and all organizations. Question is, what do we do? Do we grow from that? Do we learn from that? I think these lessons are pretty universal and I agree with you that it's about knowing and doing, but the most important element is being and really transforming yourself.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations to to help you operate at your fullest potential by integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. In each episode we will share insights, tips and stories from leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge and find more success, joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Hello friends. Welcome to Happiness Squad Podcast where we share practical tips to make flourishing your competitive edge and help you achieve stellar performance powered by well being and not at its expense. I'm Ashish Kothari and I'm on a mission to help a billion people not just experience happiness as an emotion, but really use it as a tool to to unlock their fullest potential. If you're interested in learning how to make happiness your competitive edge, please make sure to follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter at happinesssquad. Com. Today we are thrilled to bring back an inspiring conversation I had with Raj Sisodia, the father of conscious capitalism. With a PhD in business from Columbia University, Raj has authored 15 books including bestsellers like Conscious Capitalism, Everybody Matters and the most recent one, Awaken Now. Raj is one of my personal heroes. He was one of the first who really inspired me to pursue my purpose around democratizing happiness and shift from just surviving to truly thriving in this world. Raj was a pioneer in the field of management to pose a challenge and question status quo for businesses to be a force for good and pursue purpose versus relentlessly go after profits. In this episode, Raj shared his transformative journey from a traditional business professor in marketing to a passionate advocate for conscious capitalism and healing organizations. Stay till the end dear friends, as I promise you you will leave inspired just like I was to make a shift in 2025 from pursuing profits to pursuing purpose, from operating from a mindset of grabbing and doing to a mindset of giving and growing.

Hi Ashish.

Hi Raj. It's a pleasure to be with both of you.

How you both doing? Doing great Anil. Great to meet you and great to see you again Ashish.

Yeah, such a joy yesterday Raj, our conversation such so del to have you on this podcast and have shared all of your wisdom learnings and experiences with our listeners. I think that they could benefit so much from it. So thank you. Thank you for joining. Sure.

Well, you know, Raj, one of our favorite questions to ask all of our guests to get us rolling is around happiness and what we'd love to know. And our listeners, I'm sure, would say the same. What is happiness to you, and how has your definition changed since your younger years?

Well, happiness to me is about fulfillment. It's about meaning. It's about purpose. It's about a state of peace, some degree of contentment, which doesn't mean stopping striving in the world, but feeling some level of peace and contentment with the work that you're doing. Now, I'm a big believer in Viktor Frankl's perspective on this. He was very influential, and he says happiness cannot be pursued. Happiness ensues. It is the outcome of living a life of meaning and purpose. And that, he says, comes from three things. Doing work that matters makes a difference in the lives of others. Loving without condition, expressing love and receiving love, and finding meaning in your suffering. So looking at things that happen as an opportunity to grow and to learn from that. And so. So I've really been influenced. The older I get, the more I see the wisdom of what Viktor Frankl wrote. So I really tap into that very much.

Yeah, I love it, Raj. And it's so in sync with, you know, our work here at Happiness Squad, my own personal beliefs and what we've covered and we've heard so much right. From guests. This is around meaning. It's around fulfillment and peace, but it's also, you know, happiness, not just as a positive affect and emotion, but also this notion that we can find meaning in suffering. Viktor Frankl has read the Man's Search for Meaning, I think, at this point, 50 times. And every time I read it, there is a new aspect of it that kind of illustrates. I'm a big fan of reading the same text over and over, especially some of the richer texts, because every reading unfurls a layer that you hadn't. And part of it is you're shifting. Part of it is you find something else, wisdom in that text. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that on books. I also just finished reading your book Awaken, and I was touched by the. Your vulnerability and how you shared your story. Right. Both through kind of the trials, the sufferings, but also the moment of finding meaning, as you said. Right. What gave meaning to you? What were you born to do in this life? And so I just want you to kind of Give us an overview to our listeners of the book. And also what really inspired you, Raj, to go so deeply into your own journey and sharing that with the world?

Yeah. So this book was kind of a byproduct, in a way of a journey. I was already on to Conscious Capitalism, which we wrote in 2013. We started the movement in 2008. Before that, I had written a book called Firms of Endearment. World Class Companies Profit from Passion and purpose. And that was really the discovery of my own purpose through that work. Before that, I was a business professor, kind of unhappy and uninspired by what I was learning and teaching. And I felt it left out the human from the whole world of business. And there was a lot of negative consequences of the way we operate on people's well being. And finally that search, asking the question, is there a better way? The answer I've learned they always the answer is yes. Doesn't matter what you're talking about, there's always a better way. There's no limit to the ways in which we can enhance things. That led me to that search for businesses that are loved by everybody and what makes that happen. And that resulted in the pillars of Conscious Capitalism, which then become a movement. And my journey continued exploring other aspects of that, especially in leadership. And we did a book called Shakti Leadership, which was about the masculine feminine integration and finding that wholeness within each of us where we both can manifest the healthy qualities of the feminine and the masculine within each of us, regardless of gender. And ultimately led me to a book called the Healing Organization. And it was really recognizing that the way we traditionally have done business, which creates jobs and creates goods and services and creates a certain level of prosperity, but at the same time creates unnecessary suffering because of the way in which we run our businesses. The way we think about business, where we think about using people to make money for the business, whether they are customers or employees or suppliers or so forth, and using the planet and all the other things we consider to be resources that causes unintended suffering. And I said there has to be a way to think about business where we don't have to have heart attacks, be 20% higher on Monday, and 120,000 people dying from stress in the US alone every year, and 600,000 Chinese dying from homework. And I said it doesn't have to be the case that in order to make money and run a business, we have to create suffering and shorten people's lives and course on those lives. And so I was in search for this idea that Business can be and must be done in a way that reduces suffering in the world, that brings more joy into the world. And that was my quest. And I discovered that, yes, indeed, that is possible. And I found about 25 companies that I wrote about in that book and that ultimately those companies, as we found with Firms of Endearment, are also more successful. Right. So even though they're not doing it for that reason, they're having happier people and healthier customers and all of that, they are also at the same time reducing their costs and they're improving their efficiency, productivity and performance. As you've probably seen in your work, when you do the right things, good outcomes result for all of your stakeholders. And so that book was very meaningful to me. You know, I joke sometimes, you know, I had tears in my eyes when I was writing Films of Endearment or some of the stories. And that's how I connected to my purpose. I knew that it mattered to me as I was writing some of those stories. In writing the Healing Organization, I must have had that experience a half a dozen times where I was literally moved to tears, you know, and tears are important, especially tears of joy. That's telling you something very important about what matters, what you value. That's your deepest level. And as part of that work, I encountered four of my women friends as I was talking about that book and interviewing some of them and getting their thoughts. And all of them asked me the same question, by the way, are you working on your own helic because you're writing a book about healing? I'm assuming you're. I said, well, I don't really have time for that about deadline. But they say, oh, book deadlines are flexible. You have to make time and it's important. You cannot really write a book about healing unless you know you are actually working on your own healing. So I listened to them and I delayed that book by five months. And I said yes to a number of life changing experiences. Going to the Himalayas with the Shakti Spiritual Group where I had my 60th birthday up, way up in the high Himalayas in Ladakh near the border of Tibetan, and learned a lot about suffering there. I went on a silent retreat with the Brahma Kumaris and Peace Village in upstate New York with Peter Senge and David Cooperider and a bunch of other amazing people. I worked with a coach for the first time and I went to the Amazon rainforest with the Pachamama Alliance. And all of these resulted in deep, deep insights and learnings about my life, about life in general, about Meaning, purpose, all kinds of things. So I found that I had learned so much in the process of doing all of that that I felt I needed to write another book. That this was not all going to go into the healing organization. That book was almost pretty much done in terms of the outline and the content. And so I had in my mind to write a book. I was calling it the Path and it was simply going to be a distillation of these seven steps that came to me at healing in that silent retreat. It was about know yourself, love yourself, be yourself, choose your life, express yourself, become whole, and heal yourself. Those were kind of the steps that came to me. But then as I started writing and, and, and more and more, it started to turn into a reflection of my own life and illustrating each of those through my own experience. Right. And so this book really turned into a much deeper exploration of my own journey. And now I just turned 65. And so I started around the time I was 60. And it's really a time of taking stock. It's kind of the entering the third act of your life. If you think of life as kind of a three act play, right. This is the beginning of the third act and this is a time to take stock and understand what has happened and what it has meant and how do we live from here on out and what can I share from my experience that would help others perhaps not have to go through the same level of suffering or wait as. So that was really the motivation and I started writing about it. I realized that I've had in some ways an unusual life. The blend of experiences, the mix of environments. Coming from India, living in the US as a child and the west, and then going back and then coming back and then coming from this very feudal background, the warrior class and so forth, ending up doing this kind of work. There was a lot to untangle there and to make sense of. And I read a quote from Carl Rogers that that which is most personal is also most universal. That the fact that this was. Some of these experiences were quite unique to me. But at the same time I think there's a resonance there for others. So that's what I'm hoping that people are able to connect to it. And I think you mentioned that you were able to connect to some of these things in the book as well. So that was really the motivation for writing that book.

And I encourage, you know, our listeners to get a copy of the book Awakened. It is really powerful and as you said, yes, as an experience it was, it is quite universal. You Know, in all of my work with leaders, you know, there's so many of the themes that I find consistently show up. They show up in different ways, right? But the themes show up and the learnings that need to be learned often are not because we force our way, we harden our, say, our way out, right of when we face suffering, we're going to muscle our way through versus lean in and learn and make meaning from it. I also encourage folks to try out healing organizations. Raj, I discovered that book earlier this year, too, and I read it cover to cover. And I myself was moved so many times just hearing the stories of amazing corporations and what got them to live into their purpose, to truly be a force for good. You know, I'm a Chicago booth graduate. I spent 17 years at McKinsey. You know, we've so much, spent so much time helping companies increase shareholder wealth. And oftentimes with many corporates, you talk about this notion of anything beyond profits. And they what do you mean? Right? Like our job is to drive profits for shareholders. That's how I keep my job, my bonuses, et cetera, et cetera. And having real examples of companies that actually embrace this and are successful. You know, you started talking about them in the firms of endearment, but you really brought it to life, you know, in conscious capitalism as well as then healing organizations. So strongly encourage leaders who are listening to get a copy of these books because they'll inspire you to lead in a different way. They'll inspire you to actually create outcomes that rather than doing more and forcing our way through, can enable you to achieve more by being more. Not just more as a leader individually, but as enabling your organization and your team to be more right. Be more. Be more alive, be more present, be more in service of a bigger meaning. And through that, by the way, you'll also get the outcomes. As Raj's life's work shows. You will get higher shareholder returns, you'll get higher profitability, you'll have higher productivity, you'll have lower attrition. All the things that we try and focus by doing, we can achieve by being absolutely.

You know, I. I kind of joke that you could take man's search for meaning and change the name to the corporations search for meaning and the exact same lessons apply. Corporations pursue profit the way humans pursue happiness. But profits too, cannot be pursued. Profits also ensue. They're the outcome, exactly, of doing a business based on a higher purpose. Building a business on love and care, not fear and stress, and growing from adversity. Tough times are guaranteed to come for all of us and all organizations. The question is, what do we do and do we grow from that? Do we learn from that? Right? Do we turn that into a positive? So, yeah, I think these lessons are pretty universal. And I agree with you that it's about knowing and doing. But the most important element is being and really transforming yourself. Because if you're a leader, you know, you become a constraint on the consciousness of the organization or the part of the organization that you lead. So if you're stuck at a certain level, your organization will not rise above that. And if you break through to the next level of consciousness, so too can the organization. So working on yourself is a lifelong journey. It's a lifelong responsibility as well. It's not just for yourself. It's for all the lives that you touch. You're in your personal life and in your work life. You have to keep growing and evolving. And that means healing. You cannot run a healing organization if you haven't worked on your own healing because you will end up inflicting suffering on others without even realizing it.

Exactly, Raj. And so in that context, right, even in your in awaken, you talked about step number one is knowing yourself, self awareness. Self awareness also, by the way, is the heart of the nine hardwired for happiness practices. Like you, I fundamentally believe if you're not aware, it's hard to do anything else outside of it. You know, whether it's pursue your purpose, be mindful, be grateful. Nothing else becomes possible if you don't know yourself authentically. So I want to ask you, what advice do you have for leaders and individuals who are listening for them to cultivate their own self awareness. What are things that helped you, that can be things that they can start to do that will help them?

Well, I think being a kind of an observer of yourself and noticing, you know, how you respond to things, what matters to you, what moves you, what is something that others may be indifferent to you to, but you're deeply impacted by? You know, I remember reading Andrew Harvey talking about, follow your heartbreak. What is it that gives you greatest pain? Right. In my case, seeing all the things in business that were causing all of the negative impacts on customers, on employees and so forth really was a heartbreak for me. And other people didn't care about those things. That's a hint to what really matters to you. And then follow your bliss. What gives you greatest joy? The fact that I had tears in my eyes writing some of those stories was also a hint about what really matters to me. So this was about Getting to the essence, right? In India we talk about what is your nature, right? What is your, is the word that we use. What is, you know, each of us comes with our own unique and essential nature. That is something that is a gift that we are here on with and it doesn't serve us until we start to actually embrace it and love it. You know, that's the biggest leap, you know, if you go from knowing yourself to loving yourself. You know, I started to know myself, but for decades I in a way despised myself because I saw every quality that I had as a weakness. Why? Because first of all, my father gave me that message. I didn't know my father until I was about seven. He came back from Canada with a PhD. He was gone for all those years. And so I really started to know him after that. And he saw me as somebody so different from him with all these qualities that he saw as weaknesses. He said, you're too trusting, you should not trust anybody. You're too idealistic, you should not the idealistic, you should be pragmatic, you're too peace loving. You need to be rough and tough, you know, and you're too intellectual, you need to be street smart. So everything that was a natural part of me was, was deemed a weakness and something I had to strive to overcome and be the opposite of. So I spent decades literally trying to be the opposite of who I was. And I would not recommend that to anybody as a way of happiness or impact, right? To try to be the opposite of who, who you are. But because of, you know, the parents voice, especially the father's voice in the Indian culture is very, very powerful. And so that's what I was. So I was stuck in that place of not getting to that self love, right. And then ultimately I started to recognize those things as strengths. And it really came to me from a coach who said that. Do you realize that you spent 45 years trying to impress your father? And now you spent the last 15 years. That covers all my conscious capitalism work. Honoring your mother with your work. That you're bringing your mother's energy into the world of business and capitalism. And that was quite a revelation to me. I had never thought of it that way. I am like my mother. Those are all qualities that I share with her. And she was a single mother to me for the first seven years. So there's some nature and nurture going on there. But then I started to see those as my gifts, that this is something that I should not be trying to suppress, that I should actually lean into Those, Right. So it's knowing yourself, loving yourself, and then being yourself.

Right.

Not being defensive about it or unhappy about it, but actually recognizing those are the gifts. Because once you see them as gifts, then they can work for you. Otherwise you remain, you know, kind of in that victim mentality. So that was the big step, I think those first three are. They all go together. Know yourself, love yourself, and then be yourself. And takes a tremendous burden off not having to act all the time. Take off your mask and be who you are. That's what the world needs for each of us to really live into our unique set of gifts that we are here. We're one piece of the whole puzzle. We need to be bringing that peace, not trying to be some other piece.

Yes. You know, John Kabad Zinn says is, Beth, you have a zero percent chance of trying to be like somebody else, but you have 100% chance of being you. So be you. Right? Be you. Don't try and pretend, don't try and fit in. Right.

But you can still evolve yourself. Now you don't say I'm a finished product, but yeah, this is who I am and this is how I can move towards, you know, furthering, you know, my, my qualities and deepening them. And then, you know, some things that I need to develop that I don't have. Right. You can also cultivate some of those things. So it's not about being static.

But I loved it. You know, Raj, in your book and you highlight so much about, it's not about rejecting parts of us, it's about integrating. It's about connecting first with the authentic you and then integrating these other elements to grow in, evolve.

Exactly, exactly. So in my case, you know, the so called feminine energy and my mother's gifts came naturally to me, but I've learned over the years that I actually need to lean in on the other side and cultivate the healthy masculine. I kind of rejected all of the masculine energy because my father was such a manifestation of the unhealthy masculine.

Right?

Domination, aggression, hyper competition, winning at all costs. Everything becomes a battle, right. That you kind of. With that you lose the strength, courage, focus, resilience, determination, structure. So it's really about then recognizing and then cultivating and becoming whole. That's what we mean in our book, Shakti. Leadership is about wholeness, right. That each of us has our own versions of the healthy masculine and the healthy feminine energy within us. And we need to cultivate both sides so that we can show up as whole human beings. Right. Not just bringing in One side, as Martin Luther King said, we need to be tough minded and tender hearted, right? So the tender hearted part came easily to me. I needed to cultivate some of that tough mindedness as well. Otherwise, as we say, love without strength is ineffective and strength without love is tyranny. So how do we create our own, you know, unique blend of those two things in a healthy way?

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You know, we actually have a conversation with a lovely guest named Anna Reed a few weeks back and we actually talked about the masculine feminine energy. And I'll be open with both of you. A new concept for me. I mean, despite working in corporate, it's not something that I overly was aware of. You know, Raj, what you're sharing with your background, I mean, it resonates with me on so many levels. And I'm sure our listeners will say the same. I mean, you know, look, coming from an Indian heritage, you know, there were three words I once described myself to my colleagues at work. When I opened up to them, I said, you know, growing up, I thought about, you know, I'm an overachiever. You know, I seek validation and I constantly compare myself to others. And I'll tell you, you know, it, it re. It deeply affected me. And for the last eight, nine years, I've been going through my own journey of trying to understand my own programming each line of code and trying to go, okay, where can I reprogram and recode and understand, you know, what is my purpose? You know, not to be a machine, but to almost go like, okay, what is my purpose? You know, you know, it's not like, what is the meaning of life? But what I, what I find quite powerful in thinking about this is how can we, culturally speaking, encourage parents of this generation to almost raise their kids in a way that we weren't raised in order to almost instill that opportunity for their kids to think broader than those stereotypes? And I think just on the back of that, when I think about your book Awaken, you know, the subtitle that you use really resonated with me. Not to say judge a book by a cover, but, you know, you say the path to purpose, inner peace and healing. And I just would love for you, Raj, if you could delve into the importance of purpose and how it can shape our lives and contribute to our Overall well being, because I can imagine there are people who. I'm one of them. You know, I'm still looking for what my life purpose is. I'm, I'm closer to it than I've ever been after meeting Ashish and others. But, you know, for those that are probably still figuring that out, you know, share, share your thoughts on that.

Yeah. You know, so there's multiple pathways to purpose. You know, there's kind of an intellectual approach that you can use. You can go through the Igai framework, right. What are you good at? What do you love? Right. What does the world need? What can you get paid for, et cetera. And find the aura so you can go through that. And there's value in that. And I've seen purpose. People who have gotten close to their purpose that way. There's kind of the spiritual side where especially religious people just hear a calling and they feel like God is telling them this is what you're supposed to do. You know, that's kind of the original idea of calling. But then there's, to me, the experiential way, which is how I came to it. And part of it was the time that I was growing up. Nobody ever, ever used the word purpose. When I was a young person or a child or even a young adult, the word purpose was really not part of the vocabulary. Even though Viktor Frankl had written his book decades ago. But I wasn't aware of that. I had not seen it. The only purpose really, especially growing up in India in the 70s, was survival. Are you going to be able to make your way in this world? It's a harsh world out there and incredibly competitive, especially in India. The top schools I won in 100 persons get in. And this is incredible. The numbers are. Odds are stacked against you. Survival is kind of a victory in itself. And so I think we didn't have the luxury in those days to think about purpose. It was really more reflective survival level. Today it's much more kind of in the, in the ether. Right. It's part of the culture. My kids are in their 20s and they say, oh my God, I don't have a purpose yet. Listen, I said I was not 50 when I figured out my purpose. I wasn't even looking actively. They got time. I knew, yeah, I was following my. I was trying to stay true to myself to some degree, even though I had all those pressures to conform and be one way or the other. But a kernel of me remained authentic to my, to my own being. And I knew how I responded to things. Right. As I said, I know I, I responded to some of the impass of traditional ways of doing business, especially marketing. I was a marketing professor. I developed almost a deep shame for being a marketing professor because I said, my God, we I most of my researches about how marketing is unethical, ineffective and inefficient where we spend a ton of money and we get lousy outcomes. You're spending a trillion dollars a year in 2004, more than the GDP of India by the way. Right on ads, coupons and junk mail. And what are customers getting for it? What are companies and what is society getting for it? And the answers in all my research was Nothing or negative. 88% of people didn't trust marketing. If it's marketing, that means it's not true, it's not real, it's just marketing. Society is being hurt by rising obesity and diabetes and body dysmorphia and eating disorders and over consumption and all the nonsense. And then companies are getting lousy returns. So I said this is not working at any level. And I literally started a book called the Shame of Marketing. Okay? That phrase used by Peter Drucker to refer to the consumer movement which he calls the shame of marketing. He said marketing job is to look after the well being of customers. If they're not doing that, customers organize against us, against the companies. So that's the shame of marketing. So I was using that title, but it was really, as I think about it, it was a shame of my own profession. Right? It was my own personal shame that I was talking about there because I had this inner dialogue that my Father got a PhD in Agriculture Science that he was trying to cure world hunger. And I end up getting a PhD in marketing and I'm just trying to sell more. I don't have any noble purpose to what I'm pursuing here. So I had all that angst about it. I was following my heartbreak. I was writing these papers and a book called Does Marketing needed to form. And you know, I was kind of this island of negativity. And when I sent that book proposal to my mentor and co author Jack Sheth with the title Shame of Marketing, he said, Raj, people in this country want to hear about the solution of the problem. We've been writing about the problem for 10 years. Let's look at the solution. So I turned it around. I called it In Search of Marketing Excellence. I said, let's find companies that are loved by their customers even though they don't spend a ton of money on marketing, which is the opposite of the norm that led me to discover this whole other way of being. Firms of endearment, not only loved by customers, but by employees, by communities and so forth, and led me to my bliss. So this is a long way of telling you I was following my heartbreak. In that heartbreak, I was asking the question, is there a better way? And there always is a better way. The answer is always yes to whatever question you ask or whatever domain, there's always a better way. And that question that led me to find this other way, which then led me to suddenly realize, oh, my God, this is what I want to dedicate the rest of my life to, right? So I think if you continue living your life, experiencing a variety of things and staying aware of how you're reacting to those things, seeing what pains you, and then what gives you great joy, you know, somewhere between those two things is your purpose. So that's really how I came to it. I think it's a way that a number of people can come to it, but there are other avenues. But I think it changes everything. You know, the nature of my work, my experience of my work, the impact that that work had, you know, just completely turned around. I was unhappy and disgruntled and miserable, going to marketing conferences, and I had no inspiration whatsoever. And now I was continually living in a state of inspiration. I couldn't believe, you know, the deep level of joy and fulfillment I was getting in my work. But, you know, my. The personal side of my life remained unhappy and unfulfilled, but this work side was now. And I thought that was the end of the story, but that was just the beginning of this transformation, right? Because it was now I had to think about the other aspects of my life as well. That was the inner peace. The purpose came first. Then I had to work on my inner peace, right? And that was the next decade.

You know, by the way, it's interesting, you talk about marketing. So I work for Nike, and so I find it fascinating when you think about the amount of money that is spent by whether it's sporting brands, whether it's consumer fmcg, you know, to basically entice consumers. You know, I've. I've. I've listened to a lot of your talks around, you know, you got two sides to, to the wings, right? You got Cud's customers and you've got your employees and, you know, make sure that you don't lead your customers astray. You know, if. If you don't have the right product for them, lead them to the right product. That's best for them. And it's, you know, I'm sure there are a lot of people out there listening who work in marketing and think, wait, hang on a second. No, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to educate consumers. We're trying to understand them better by doing consumer insights. And it is quite crazy how much money goes into this space. And, you know, just a provocative thought for you both, I was thinking to myself, what if a company one day goes, you know what, Instead of marketing the products that they make to their consumers, why not just focus 100% of your marketing on the people that make it? Focus on the effect and the impact that's having benefiting the. The globe, benefiting the world, benefiting society, and almost take the focus off the product. That's just meant to be a bit provocative for a moment. But, I mean, just, you know, Raj, back to you on this. You know, as people again, they work. They may work in marketing, they may work in corporate. They may work in professional services. They may not know their purpose. What advice would you give to them from your experience, from what you've written about your own journey, that they can almost today kind of take that and go, okay, I may not know my purpose, but here, here's one thing I can do to kind of keep that in the front of mind as I go, wake up every morning, kiss my partner, kiss my kids, go to work and go out through my day and come back and repeat it, but do it in a way that actually has meaning, even though it may not be a clear purpose.

Yeah. So the good guidance from this comes from Richard Leider, who's one of the great thinkers about purpose. And he said, if you don't know your purpose yet, the default purpose for a human being is to give and to grow and find your own expression of those two things. How are you going to give, which means have a positive impact on the lives of others? Right. And how are you going to grow? How are you going to become a more powerful version of yourself? Right. So in which way do you need to grow and how are you going to give? So give and grow, measuring success by the way you touch the lives of others. That's really it. And purpose is the way that you do that in a way that's resonant with you. And so if you haven't found it yet, just think about it. And our culture and society teaches us that the purpose of life really is to grab and go get as much as you can as quickly as you can get rich or die trying, become a millionaire by 30 and retire. Those used to the older, what is the American dream, Right? Just work hard like crazy, do whatever you have to do to make the money and then retire and exhale and you're lying on a beach somewhere, right? That was kind of the way life was framed. And work is this torture that you have to go through in order to get there. I've spe many people in banking and other fields who say, oh, I'm just going to do this for X number of years and I've got a number in mind and then I can do what I really want to do, et cetera. Right. So we kind of separate those two things, but I think ultimately it should be, you know, as we say to businesses as well, it's not how you spend your money, it's how you make your money, right? So it's not that you spend money on corporate social responsibility to be a good citizen. It's about that you're making your money by actually having a positive impact on the world, right? You're not selling products that are causing obesity and then putting money into anti obesity programs, those kinds of things. I don't think to me that's the default.

You know, Raj, I love that. And talking about, you know, coming to purpose at much later stages in life for me, I also, it was in my 40s that I tuned into my purpose, my reason for being. It also came from kind of tuning into my suffering, this dissonance between the work that I was doing, you know, in my consulting work, driving profits, right. Often helping my clients negotiate lower rates, literally like, how do you actually make more money, right? How do you spend less money towards actually a broader impact, you know. And I was part of the journey at McKinsey while I was there, where after close to 90 years, right. McKinsey will be a hundred years very soon. After 90 plus years, we had a mission statement, we had values, but we had never articulated our purpose. And an exercise that we took breath, introduced such a fresh breath of air. And at McKinsey, the purpose statement that we defined and activated was to help create positive, enduring change in the world. Because we had done all the work, right? We have done marketing work and operations work and organizational work. But the why was always missing. As Simon Sinek said, what's the why? Why? Why are we doing this work? And it acted as a huge north light for the company. A lot of the work we are doing now at Happiness Squad, I'm working with a packaging company they actually had a beautiful purpose, right? They had a wonderful holistic purpose. They hadn't done the second part of it, which I often see missing. Also they hadn't activated it. Most of their 7,8000 people actually never connected. It was there, it was on, it was on PowerPoints, it was kind of in plaques. But they levered living into it, right? So a lot of the work was around helping them actually live into purpose. So even when it is out there, a lot of people don't live into that, but also to help them connect it individually to people's purpose. Right? More and more, from all of our research, people want their lives to be meaningful. They look for meaning at work, but often not find it. So as leaders, one of the biggest roles we can play is actually help connect people, people's purpose to kind of what we are doing and collectively with that shape it because the impact is huge, right? It's more resilience, it's better outcomes, it's more productivity, it's more engagement. I mean Nietzsche said it best. Those who have a why can survive anyhow. And it is so true. It is so true. And that's the exercise that I, you know, I love. I mean we got connected through Professor Jane Dutton, right. And the amazing work that Michigan Ross and the center for Positive Organization Scholarship are doing around job crafting. So again, a resource that I would invite our listeners to look into. But if, if we can make purpose come alive in the lives of what we are in the business for as businesses beyond profits and connected to individuals, we can have such amazing impact in the world and a very positive greatest gift.

It's the greatest gift you can give somebody is have them engage in work that is meaningful and that is purposeful. Connects with their essence and their soul. And I would say that 80, 90% of people on the planet don't have that luxury. They don't get that gift. And if we can't do it, I mean the company that I've seen that's doing it at scale is Unilever, where they're putting 160,000 people through one day purpose workshops and helping them connect their personal purpose to the corporate purpose and then use job crafting and a variety of ways to change their work portfolio so that you are doing work that is personally resonant and meaningful to you and of course serving the well being of the corporation at the same time. That's very, very possible and necessary.

Do you know one thing I'd like to share and this is a quote from yourself, Raj and It's something that I feel is applicable to individuals. And I almost would raise the question to leaders and how they would bring this into their organization. But you said vulnerability is an ability. It's not a liability. And I know that you said that people, we are stoic. You know, we may think we have a purpose, the company's purpose is there for our purpose. And I guess it's an invitation to say, hey, you know, I know Brene Brown was the first person that made this resonate with me. If vulnerability is not controlling the outcome, companies I admire have to appreciate they have to control the outcome. But how can we as individuals, as we look for our purpose, be open with our managers, be open with our peers, with our families, say, hey, you know, maybe this isn't what it means to me that I thought it did. So what do I do in order to crack it? And I think that's something that, you know, again, in the hardware for happiness practices, we do talk about purposes, we do talk about how it can give you meaning. And it may be different for some, but even just taking the first step to understand it I think is already progress. And people who do that should be applauded. Raj, we have. Go ahead, please.

No, I think that's way, way true. Vulnerability is essential. Without vulnerability, there's no authentic connection that can happen.

Yes.

Between people because you're not really sharing your true self. So it's really very much model authenticity and it has to be modeled by the leaders. A great example of this right now is Satya Nadella and the extraordinary transformation that he has brought about at Microsoft. And he has embodied that in himself. Right? So he talks about empathy, he talks about a growth mindset, and he's incredibly open and vulnerable himself with his leadership team and shared all the challenges of his special needs child and his upbringing and everything else. And that is really completely transformed the culture of Microsoft and has catapulted them into a level of performance that was almost unimaginable. What they've achieved in the last eight years after everybody thought Microsoft has seen its heyday and is kind of becoming rapidly irrelevant, he completely changed that. And it's a great example of what a leader can do in a relatively short amount of time, even in a very, very large established corporation who completely refound it, it's kind of a re founder now. This is like Microsoft, next level of Microsoft, next birth of Microsoft.

Raj, we have a relatively new segment that we'd love to try and end this conversation with you on. And I know you've done it in the past with other interviews, and so it's effectively a rapid fire. So first word that comes to mind or thought, please share it with us. The first is what is one piece of advice you would give to someone who is seeking greater happiness in their life?

Connect to your purpose. Be on that journey of knowledge that is required to discover your purpose.

Love it. What's the last show that you binge watched that brings you joy?

Oh, Ted Lasso.

Awesome.

Exactly. Succession did not bring me joy. I binge watched Succession. That was not about joy. No.

My wife keeps telling me I need to watch season two of White Lotus. I'm like, after season one of White Lotus, I'm like, no, no, no. I need something that's a little bit more uplifting. What is your favorite book on flourishing?

I would say Synchronicity by Joseph Jaworski. Very powerful book.

I love that book.

Yeah.

Nice.

What is an ordinary moment in your life that either brings you or has brought you great joy?

It's really spending time with my children, especially my special needs son, who, you know, I've now, as in the process of writing this book, I've completely reinvented my relationship with my son. I've healed my relationship with my son and it has become really, from something that felt like a burden and a responsibility has become a source of joy and deep fulfillment.

Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with us, Raj. On the back of that, the last question, what is one thing that you are deeply grateful for right now?

That I get to do the kind of work that I have been able to do. That my work is a source of not only fulfillment for me, but a positive impact and inspiration for others. That's a great grift. I don't take that for granted any day. Every day. I feel grateful for that.

Raj, this has been such an amazing conversation. We would love to have you back at a later time to delve deeper into the realm of conscious capitalism, because I think it's a message that so many leaders will need to need to hear. And I would love to have a role in amplifying that you've been on a revolution that you unleashed in 2008. There's tons of great work and resources available, but we touch on that another day. But I walked away with so much from this episode. Thank you for sharing your insights. I really encourage our listeners to check out Rajsodia, his latest book Awaken, but as well as many of the others that that preceded it from healing organizations, Shakti leadership, conscious capitalism, forms of endearment I can personally say I've read them all. I've benefited a lot from it. Thank you for all the amazing work you're doing and for all the healing that you are creating in the world and the journey of your personal healing that you shared. Thank you, Raj.

Thank you, Ashish and Anil. I really enjoyed my time. It went by too quickly.

Yes, it did. I just want to say it's been an honor and a pleasure getting to know you and as Ashish said, look forward to continuing the conversation and amplifying the work that we're doing to make a difference, truly, both at the individual and at the organizational level. So, you know, big hugs and lots of love to you, Raj, and to your to your family and to your friends. Thank you.

Thank you. The same to both of you as well. Thank you.

Take care. Bye. Dear friends, that wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy and health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us. Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care of care and see you next week.